


the angel of small death and the codeine scene

by prolix (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Female Dean Winchester, Female Sam Winchester, Genderbending, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Pre-Season/Series 06, Retcon, Strong Female Characters, mostly canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 17:05:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4674572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/prolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her Daddy tells her once that 'Winchester' is a type of gun, a lean bit of steel that can rip a man open from thirty paces as soon as glitter under sunlight.<br/>Deanna decides she likes the sound of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the angel of small death and the codeine scene

**Author's Note:**

> hello!  
> this is my first foray into the land of Supernatural fanfiction, so I hope I've done the fandom credit.  
> the title is taken from Hozier's self-same song, as are the lyrics book-ending the fic.  
> this should pretty much follows canon until the last few minutes of 5.22 ("Swan Song"), but there are a few discrepancies- because I am a firm believer in the fact that John Winchester treats his hypothetical daughters differently than he treats his canonical sons- and a lot of retcon (in the original sense; this is not a fix-it). And there is, of course, genderbending. But that you knew.  
> leave a comment if you find some aspect of canon that I've twisted beyond all recognition, but remember that there are a few places where I've purposefully tweaked canon elements. also, any grammar/spelling catches are greatly appreciated and I will try to fix anything you spot as soon as I can. please and thank you!  
> now: enjoy, and I love you!
> 
> \- p
> 
> * obligatory warning label: references to child neglect and an instance of abuse (in the form of John Winchester), a single instance of rape and multiple instances of trading sex for money, the symptoms of depression, and survivor's guilt.
> 
> ** author's note (november, 2017) : it's been brought to my attention via a comment that this story depicts women, female sexuality, and characters in a misogynistic way, and i have to agree. i'm disappointed in myself for not having the self-awareness to recognize it earlier than two years after the fact, but i would like to take the time now that i have to present a caveat to this story. i am not proud of it, or myself for writing it. i do think it is important that i not try to hide behind any excuse for the way i presented women in this story, and that includes deleting this work. it would be negligent of me to pretend like this never happened. i will warn readers that i do not support this work any more, that i am disappointed in it and the views it presents, and that they are no longer my views on sex, sexuality, or women. it's my responsibility as author to make this known to my audience. thank you, commentor, and thank you to everyone reading.

 

"With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean

She's the angel of small death and the codeine scene

With her straw-blonde hair, her arms hard and lean

She's the angel of small death and the codeine scene"

 

* * *

  
  


Her Daddy tells her once that 'Winchester' is a type of gun, a lean bit of steel that can rip a man open from thirty paces as soon as glitter under sunlight.

Deanna decides she likes the sound of that.

 

At five Deanna Winchester can identify seven permutations of witch and every wendigo, katsune, werewolf, and poltergeist put in front of her.

At six she knows nine ways to kill a skinwalker, and can disassemble and reassemble three types of shotguns, four rifles, and seven pistols at the drop of a hat.

At seven her father lines up beer cans on top of Bobby's wooden fence posts and hands her a Glock. She hits every single one. Beer bleeds into the dirt. John laughs and claps her on the shoulder and suddenly she's four years old and in Lawrence hitting wiffle balls with a plastic bat as he throws them to her. And then a second later she's seven and in Sioux Falls and her father is leaning over her and saying into her ear "That's right- shoot to kill, baby girl."

It feels like an initiation.

 

When Deanna is ten, she wakes up on a misty November morning to the loud crash-and-bang of John and Bobby bellowing at each other downstairs.

Sammy is six as of three months ago and John is hellbent on taking her for her first hunt, to teach her how to shoot a magnum and bless holy water like he'd done with Deanna.

Girls gotta learn how to defend themselves sooner than boys, he'll say, like he always does, girls gotta learn the world doesn't owe them nothin'. As though boys are owed something. As though, at six, little Sammy will be able to reach out and take from the world; at ten, Deanna should be able to understand that this life doesn't give a shit about her.

Bobby is retaliating, at great length and volume, with his own opinion of that idea. Sammy's standing just outside the eye of this cyclone, her favorite dingy picture book clasped in two chubby fists, face set in that ice-and-steel way Deanna knows no six year old should have. She wants to reach for her, sneak her away into the living room until the ugly clatter of yelling is over, tuck her into the curve of the sofa's armrest and let her nibble at those crumbly mint candies she likes so much. Anything to get that flat brittleness out of her expression.

Instead she gets to see her baby sister marched off into the backseat of the Impala, Bobby growling at John "get the fuck outta my house" as she goes, quiet and meek like she never is around Deanna, pressing her nose to the glass and blinking owlishly. Deanna's still plastered to the threshold of Bobby's front door, watching her because there's nothing else to do and no other way to warn her of what's going to happen next. No way to smooth her hair and make her recite the times tables of monster killing over and over, check to make sure she still knows the Latin and Greek and Gaelic phrases she'd memorized at four.

Deanna had told herself she'd make sure Sammy was ready for this, but when the day comes she's stock-still in the doorway, unprepared and scared, so scared for her baby sister, watching it unfold like some slow-motion trainwreck. And then the Impala's engine guns and the sleek chassis pulls away down the dirt driveway, kicking up sienna clouds of dust.

Bobby tells her to get washed up and help him with dinner. She does. She ignores the way he looks just on the verge of apologizing to her; she finds herself too angry to be relieved when he never does.

They're gone for two days, a quick in-and-out job completely different

from Deanna's first hunt. She's sick to her stomach the whole time they're away, curled up on the couch watching TNG while Bobby fields house calls and grumbles about 'if I didn't love those girls half to death…' when he thinks Deanna can't hear him.

It's 8:04 at night on day two when John slams the screen door open and then closed, yelling and swearing with equal fervor. Sammy bolts past him and blitzes up the stairs as fast as her little legs will take her, and Deanna's following before she can even translate John's raging tirade, aimed at his youngest daughter's retreating back.

She pushes Sam's hair away from her face as she crouches over the toilet bowl in the upstairs bathroom and vomits, shaking, tears mingling with the bile until she's a mess of snot and hiccuping sobs and dribbling puke.

Deanna fills a paper Dixie cup under the sink tap and makes Sam wait to drink it until after she's done gargling some cheap minty mouthwash. They curl up on Deanna's bed after the hysterics pass, Sammy's octopus arms squeezing the life out of her.

The monster had been a skinwalker. Fresh out of the gate, six years old and still not entirely confident in her way around a gun, Sammy had been told to shoot the damn thing. Shoot to kill, John had told her. Shoot to kill, baby girl.

"It looked HUMAN," Sammy warbles from where her head is pressed into Deanna's stomach.

"Was that thing a person? Did I kill a person?" There's panic seeping in at the edges of her words, tacky and coagulating like stale blood.

Deanna hushes her with a mint she finds in her secret stash of candies under her mattress.

"Dad said to kill it. You gotta trust him, Sammy, if he says kill it, then you kill it. Okay?"

But Sam's crying too hard to answer her. She drifts off after an hour or two like that, pressed like a bookend into Deanna.

Deanna smooths her baby sister's hair and creeps downstairs in hopes of leftovers in the fridge, careful not to step on the old planks that squeak and the new ones that crackle, holding onto the stair rail and eyeing the light splaying out from under the library door.

"-never going to learn how to be a hunter if she can't shank a fucking 'walker!"

"Did you make her pull the trigger? A six year old girl- a six year old girl who cries during BAMBI for fuck's sake! Did you make her kill that thing, John?"

Deanna closes her eyes and balls up her fists, looks down at them. How small they are. How small they are, when she's got this big anger inside her. This big fear.

How is she ever going to keep her sister safe with tiny hands like these?

"You think it would've let her go if it was the other way around? You think all the shit in the world is just gonna pass right over her because she's a kid?"

"Don't you fuck with me, Winchester. I love that kid like she's my own, and I love her sister, and God knows why, but I love you too. But what you're doing to those girls, John, it's crushin

g them."

Deanna presses her fists to her eyes, trying to make the world seem blacker and emptier than it is, because those voices are overpowering everything else.

"What, exactly, is it I'm doing to them? Let's hear it, Bobby."

"Godammit, John! D'you know how worried sick Deanna was? Pullin' shit like that, taking her baby sister without even a goodbye-"

Deanna's dizzy and achy from her fists pressing too hard into her eyes, from a thousand and one other things that she doesn't want to think about. She slips back upstairs without the food for Sammy she'd come down to get. She'll make it up in the morning with a real breakfast, something not entirely consistent of bacon, she tells herself.

As she curls back under the covers of her bed, careful not to stir Sam, she remembers her first hunt. And in between the highs and lows of her sister's rhythmic breathing, she realizes that no one had chewed John out about that hunt, never mentioned the red that chased the whites of her eyes, didn't remark upon the fact that she didn't speak for three days afterward.

Her eyes idle over Sammy's sleeping form. She glances at her hands again.

She wonders how she's supposed to protect that much with so little.

 

It's a bleak Christmas, just like all the others Deanna's celebrated, overcast and a motley of grey. Snow falls in infrequent smatterings, and John hasn't been home since the night before.

Deanna makes what breakfast she can (meaning: Cheetos) and settles in to watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special with Sam.

On a commercial break Sam wriggles out of the blankets like the goddamn octopus she is, tumbles from the edge of the bed and rummaged around until she pulls out a small cardboard box. She offers it to Deanna with big cow-eyes all full of hope.

"No. No, this is Dad's." Deanna frowns at the box like it wronged her.

Sammy pushes it at her, insistent in a way only a child could be.

"I want you to have it."

Deanna hesitantly takes the box, feeling guilty and ashamed but also somehow lighter, happy, under Sam's smile. She realizes belatedly that she'd do anything to see that chubby-cheeked shy smile light up her baby sister's face.

"Thank you, Sammy. I… love it."

Deanna pulls the amulet down around her neck, feels it thump at her sternum, an already-familiar weight that she thinks she could learn to depend on, in time. Her fingers close around it as Sam cuddles back up next to her, warming the contours of the metal and letting it fill with the residual heat of her pulse.

John never asks where Deanna got the amulet from, why she wears it religiously around her neck come hell or high water. And that's fine, because it means Deanna never has to tell him.

Sitting curled up with Sam on Christmas morning, looking down at the way her fingers close around the little medallion, Deanna thinks her hands don't look so small after all.

 

At twelve Deanna hand-crafts a balsam-and-pine shotgun in shop class, sands it down and smooths the inside of the barrel, scratches 'D.W.' into the butt with her key to the farmhouse. She presents it to her teacher amongst a field of birdhouses and book cases and step-stools from her fellow classmates. He runs a rough palm over the forestock and the trigger guard and looks her up and down like he's just realizing that she has a bra on under her tshirt, that a girl's tiny hands made a perfectly-proportioned model of a Remington SPR100. She takes it home and sets it down on the kitchen table, smiles at Sammy's curled-up form on the couch, face buried in a neon-bright paperback.

At night she crawls back downstairs and holds her project in her hands, fiddling with the hammer. She made this, her and her tiny hands and vicious resentment of the other kids who'd snickered at her while she worked. It felt good, to make something completely from scratch, to take something raw and undone and make it whole, seamless, make it powerful and familiar and good.

It's seventeen years too early, but it's the same swell of pride that a heuristically-deprived angel of the Lord will experience as he puts Deanna carefully, painstakingly, meticulously back together from her basest atoms.

 

When Deanna is thirteen, Sam gets the ever-loving shit beaten out of her by a throng of pimply eleven-year-olds in an alley behind a Texaco.

Sam gets out of school at three like clockwork, sitting patiently on a bench outside or talking to one of her small array of friends when Deanna shows up to walk her home. But today she's not there.

Deanna doesn't panic immediately. She stuffs her hands in her pockets and pokes her head in the library to ask the woman behind the desk if she'd seen a scrawny Winchester about yeigh high scurrying around. It's only when the woman shakes her head that Deanna starts to worry.

Sam is a smart kid, hunter-smart, which means she wouldn't wander off on her own without telling Deanna. Especially not after the rage John had flown into after he'd heard about Sam going downtown to check out a bookstore on her own after school. Deanna didn't want to think about the argument that had stirred up, so she thumbs at the cell phone Bobby had given her last month and sets off toward the lower half of the town.

She doesn't have to look long. For a kid as fucking skinny as Sam, she's got a helluva pair of lungs on her.

There are five of them and one of her baby sister, and before she can check the motion her hand is closing around the familiar leather hilt of the blade strapped to her hip. She forces her fingers to uncurl, to back away from the mental cannonfire of a hunt, to form something less deadly with her hands.

Her fists come down hard, but so do their fucking boots. Except she's beheaded all variety of unholy abominations, shanked monsters that kids only dream about in their darkest nightmares, killed a werewolf with a goddamn trowel. They scatter holding dislocated shoulders and limping on compound fractures, trying to force the blood back into their noses, shouting invectives when their broken fingers curl. She hates and loves the power rush in one smeary mosaic of emotion, but then Sam starts making these ugly wet hacking noises like tissue paper tearing or a knife thudding deep into flesh, and she has to force herself to stop. To sit against the back wall of the Texaco in some shit-strewn alley. To hold onto her sister as she pops the boot-shaped imprints out of her lungs. To hold on tighter as the wet hacking turns into sobs.

The tannoy above the gas pumps is belting out a staticky rendition of "Funkytown", and wasn't that just something. Deanna breaks down into half-abortive laughter despite herself, laughter that bubbles up somewhere deep in her stomach. She ignores the glower Sam pitches at her. Tries to ignore how much anger and fear can fit into that pre-pubescently clumsy, scrappy little body. How much poison little Sammy's got seething in her.

"You ever get in the shit again, Sammy, you start screaming 'funky town' as loud as you can, understand? You need me, I'll come beat the shit outta whoever. Fucking hell, Sammy, why can't you ever get into it with the chess club or something?"

Three weeks later, John and Sam throw themselves into another argument over a hunt in Illinois. Midway through, Sam grits out "Funky town" to Deanna, who's sitting on the couch. Deanna freezes, looking over at her baby sister and her father. Sees how much bigger than her he is. Sees how much rage he's got. Sees Sam's own anger slip away into confusion as Deanna doesn't move.

When John tells Sam to go pick a branch from the tree outside, Deanna closes her eyes and looks away.

 

Deanna is fifteen and the world is ending.

Her boobs are big enough now to fill a C-cup, she's bleeding halfway to anemic every month, she's suddenly sort of curious about EYELINER of all things, and her ass is not as compliant as it used to be about fitting into her favorite pair of jeans.

Total Armageddon.

Sammy is eleven and gangly and nerdy and perfect, untouched by the hellacious side-effects of puberty. She's also sort of idolizing Deanna, has been since she was ten, and is more demanding than ever that they do ridiculous girly things together like makeovers and hair-braiding and gossiping.

John and Bobby, of course, have absolutely no idea what to do. John's been itching to hit the interstate and leave South Dakota in his rearview for months now: it's a tangible heaviness in the air. This is the longest they've stayed in any one place since Deanna was four, and it's apparent but unspoken that the phase has passed.

Deanna works at the local landscaping company half a block from her high school, hauling big bags of shorn grass and clipped branches to even bigger dumpster units, has been since she could legally get her worker's permit. John is gone five days out of every seven, hunting to blow off the steam he can't around his daughters, sometimes taking Deanna with him, sometimes gunning it solo. Bobby takes small jobs around the Dakotas and in Colorado to keep himself from going stir-crazy around two adolescent/pseudo-teenage girls.

More often than not Deanna's the one buying groceries and deodorant and razors and tampons, shampoo and the navel oranges Sammy likes, big sudoku books when she can afford to splurge, buckets of gritty instant coffee mix when she can't. She makes Sam do her homework before bed, trades shifts at work to make time to go to the science fair her baby sister's been pestering her about since the beginning of time, makes sure library books are in on time and field trip slips have convincing enough forged signatures on them.

At night, Sam will still sometimes slip under Deanna's blanket and mold herself into the curve of Deanna's spine: two open parentheses, back to back. Sometimes Sam will bury her tears in Deanna's hair or her shaking palms in the front of her sister's shirt. Other times she'll talk, babble about everything, anything, and nothing at all until Deanna snarls "for fuck's sake, Sammy, go the fuck to sleep" or she dozes off mid-word on her own.

She worries about the creases in the corners of Deanna's eyes- not the ones that frame her irises with curves of delight when she laughs, but the ones that carve shadows into her skin when she thinks Sam isn't looking and she can drop the smile. The sudden flinty hardness of her jaw and the wire-tense line of her shoulders. Sammy's not dumb, and she's not oblivious, especially when it comes to her sister. She can see the burden of Atlas in the way Deanna moves when she comes back from a hunting trip with Dad, or when Sammy leaves for one. The punishment of Prometheus in her expression when Sam clings to her in the bleak of night and whispers "nightmare". The fear of Daphne in every sinew and every muscle when Dad comes home bleeding from claw marks on his ribs and stab wounds in his arms.

And she has no idea how to stop it.

The day finally comes when John stumbles through the front door clutching Deanna in a fireman's carry, blood in rivulets dripping down her neck.

"Vampire nest." He rasps at Bobby as he shoves his way into the living room, laying her down on the couch. Sam runs for the first aid kit in the kitchen on instinct.

John swabs the two bullet-sized holes in her neck with antiseptic in the form of two fingers of Smirnoff. Deanna chokes and groans, squeezing her hands into fists. Sam hides the wound in gauze and wraps her hand around her sister's. Outside, it begins to rain.

She stays like that for hours, until Deanna grumbles and rolls over, cracks an eye open and leers at Sam for a long moment.

"I'm gone for three days, and you turn into a ragamuffin."

Sam laughs, propping Deanna's feet on her lap so she can lean back against the cushions.

"I'm going for a grungy, punk-rock sort of look. Think it worked?"

"Go wash your hair, kid." Deanna growls, pushing herself upright. One hand comes up and drums across the gauze on her neck, a nervous tic and a damage report all bundled into one.

"You okay?"

"Give or take a couple pints of blood; sure."

Sam frowns: there's Atlas, in the ersatz glitter of her smirk, the tight bundle of muscles framing her collarbone, the way the worry line steadily emerging between her eyebrows reappears. There's Daphne, in the too-bright sheen of her eyes, the anxiety still prominent in the cords of her neck.

I see you, Sam thinks. You don't fool me anymore.

 

Deanna is sixteen and Sammy is twelve and there is no way she can tell her baby sister, but also no way that she won't figure it out on her own. Sam's book-smart, sure, but she understands how people work on a level that John and Deanna don't.

Deanna leans up against the motel door, feels the undercurrent chill of September wind, and puts her face in her hands.

The bridge of her underwear is still soaked and it's uncomfortable and embarrassing and exactly what she had coming to her. Her thighs will clench randomly from time to time, feebly warding off phantom pain she's too numb to feel.

Sex is sex, she murmurs into her palms, and sex can't be a bad thing.

Sam's already conked out on the furthest bed, slack-jawed in sleep, when she finally opens the door.

Deanna beelines for the shower, stepping into ruthlessly hot water and scrubbing with the cheap motel soap until her skin is a raw pink and her nerves are all scalded with heat and friction.

Then she swallows a lungful of air, closes her eyes, and runs a finger from urethra to clit. Her hand comes away bloody and her vision pitches.

She wipes away that bastard's traces of himself with a spare hand towel, but it stings no matter how gentle she is, and the steam catches the faint smell of copper-and-iron and stale sex and traps it until she's forced to turn the shower off.

She aches in a place she knows she can't reach, aches in her core and in her ribs. She leans her forehead against the mirror above the sink and lets her shoulders shudder with each grueling exhale.

Sex is sex.

By the time she's changed and stuffed her ruined underwear to the bottom of the trash can, Sammy is sitting cross-legged on her bed with an Animorphs book propped open on one knee. She looks up and frowns.

"Where were you?"

Deanna feigns nonchalance and feels her teeth grind under the force of it.

"Nowhere."

Sam stares at her for long, uncounted seconds. Deanna feels like it's written all over her, just like the blood and cum had been half an hour ago.

She's always been easy. Sex is sex, and any sex is good. She likes smoky voices and blue eyes and laughter that fills her chest. Half the girls her age had pawned off their virginities for less than what was promised to her tonight, and Deanna's not exactly new to this rodeo.

But it had gone wrong, somehow, and she didn't know where. And it had hurt, had hurt in a new way, and she'd had nothing but her hands to push him off, fists to pound on his chest, to brace herself against the pitted mattress. Because this wasn't a monster, because she had no silver bullet to bury in his flesh, because her bowie knife was lost among her scattered clothes.

She was taught as a child to shoot to kill, but never what to do when the gun is taken away.

She stares back at Sam and remembers with crystalline clarity the way his nails had dug scratches into the insides of her thighs. How, if she's not careful, she'll reopen those marks all over again.

Sam says "Okay" into Deanna's silence and plucks a red wrapper from the nightstand, offers it to her.

"Want one?"

Deanna smiles around the Kit Kat wafer as Sammy tells her about the hunt yesterday. How her tracking skills are getting better, she thinks, and how the little old lady on the corner had given them a whole peach cobbler for their efforts. When Sam's hand slips into hers, she tries so hard not to grip too tight, hang onto her sister like the last anchor in a thrashing riptide.

 

Deanna is sixteen-so-close-to-seventeen and likes girls.

Know-it-all Sammy would call this an 'untested hypothesis' because Deanna's never been with a girl outside of a few makeout sessions behind the local bar and maybe that one co-ed who'd taken her back to her dorm for the night, but she refuses to call any of those valid. Experimenting; it's practically standard for any and all teenagers.

Deanna glances over at Sammy, who's doing crosswords upside down off the lip of the motel armchair like the freakazoid she is. Deanna's completely sucked into a marathon of Twin Peaks (totally NOT a cop procedural) and is trying to ignore the fact that she is

a) discovering her bisexuality while watching a marathon of Twin Peaks in a shitty motel room, and

b) growing increasingly suspicious about the complete lack of boys Sam seems to be interested in.

It must be said that Deanna could not give a flying fuck over her baby sister's sexual leanings. As long as she knew how to properly load a magazine and had the Latin incantations for holy water memorized, Deanna could- would- love her baby sister in any form she chose to take.

It was more complicated when she turned that worldview onto herself.

John Winchester did not talk about sex. Ever. He barely even gave Deanna The Talk when it became apparent that training bras just weren't cutting it anymore. He didn't talk about love, either, or lust, and mostly just vaguely glazed over every other emotion on the human spectrum. After Mary had died, it was like those things lost all their former value to him. Maybe they did.

John didn't have an opinion on his daughter's nebulous bisexuality or his other daughter's complete disinterest in romantic relationships with boys, because those topics were never broached.

Deanna still had those few terror-filled doubts, however, no matter how hard she tried to drown them in television chatter or Sammy's chatter.

John was, from ages four through ten, the only tangible thing in a world of uncertainty and anger and fear for Deanna. If she'd had anyone else, maybe John's opinion wouldn't have weighed so heavily now, but it was her and Sammy and Daddy against the world for as long as she could remember. Being rejected by him would feel a lot like being flung from orbit.

Deanna glances over at Sam, tongue poking out between her lips as she scrawls into her tiny section of the New York Times, hair askew and toppled over the armchair in a wave of warm brown.

And she decides that Sam should never have to hold that kind of fear in her heart for anyone's opinion.

"Hey, Sam-I-Am."

The newspaper drops to reveal Bitchface Number Nine: Do Not Disturb. Deanna sticks her tongue out at her.

"C'mere."

Sam rights herself and pads over, and although there's suspicion in her expression, her movements are easy and relaxed, trusting. Her arms and legs are too long for her waist, hair too long and jaw too angular, but she's got clever eyes that light up when Deanna laughs at her horrible jokes, a dimpled grin that's two shades too shy, and the kind of stone-cold encyclopedic tank of a brain most masters students would kill for.

Deanna grabs for the bag she'd thrown down on the couch when she'd gotten back from running the pool table circuit. Sam eyeballs her but sits cross-legged in front of her anyway, thumbing at a ragged fingernail.

"Don't get all chick-flick-y on me," Deanna grumbles in warning before pulling out her Stila arsenal.

Sammy goes bug-eyed like a switch was pulled, the lurking Bitchface she was about to pull totally annihilated in favor of curious wonder.

"You tell Dad and I make you look like a pre-nubile whore the next time you want to go to the science fair, Sam-I-Am." Deanna grins, raptor-like, "This shit is fucking magical, lemme tell you."

Sam takes that as a go-ahead, because she's launched herself into the tiny pile of cosmetics and started pawing through them with a fervor only a thirteen year old would have.

Deanna has the bare essentials of both makeup and the knowledge of its application, but she remembers the tubes of Stila mascara her mom used to keep in a pencil holder on her dresser, and so that was what she spent an entire paycheck on at a crappy CVS in Seekonk when the time came.

Because girls in pretty makeup weren't a commodity. Pretty girls in makeup turned heads in pool halls and backwater dives and made keeping up appearances so much easier. Because big, smoky eyes and cheeks colored in peach-blow made Deanna feel less jittery. More in control.

That being said, felt-tipped eyeliner was a fucking pain in the ass.

"I swear to God if you move one more time I'm gonna…" Deanna growls, flicking her sister in between the eyes as she readjusts her grip on the pen.

Sam's lips quirked, just the vaguest shadow of humor crossing over her face before it left.

Deanna had ditched foundation and concealer, knowing at a glance that Sam was far paler than she was. Damn kid and her books.

Sam, true to form, had pointed at the most neutral shade of pink-beige Deanna had ever fucking seen and said "that one". She was destined to be an accountant or a lawyer or something equally as bland.

The eyeliner was actually less of a problem than Deanna had dreaded, which was kind of disheartening because it meant her tween sister had better eyeliner wings than she ever did.

Deanna smudged her finger into the shadow, working it over the crease of Sam's eyelids and fading it out toward her brow bone. That she dusted a warm white, sat back, and rubbed her hands to dislodge the girly gunk sticking to her fingers.

Sam peeked at her from under her eyelashes, then opened them all the way and reached out for the mirror Deanna fished out from her grab-bag.

"Oh."

"You think you can do better?" Deanna snaps, but there's no real venom in it- she's too preoccupied rubbing her eyeliner-stained fingertips on her sweatpants.

"No, it's-"

Deanna flicks her gaze up in time to catch Sam's. A tiny grin peeks out.

She's warm, muted colors like foggy sunrise or coffee gentled by cream, her angles softened into curves. She's a gradient of downy, linen whites and butter-soft amaretto browns and Southwestern horizon pinks, all arranged to frame her face like a photograph. Her eyes are dinner plates in her face and she's a little slack-jawed, tilting the mirror left and right as if afraid the person in the glass will vanish.

She's beautiful in that organic, warm way Deanna never is. Sam's got Mary's delicate eyelashes and sweet button nose and gentle features, while Deanna has John's harsh angles and knife-edge beauty.

Deanna realizes that this is the first time Sam's ever seen herself like this; outside of pre-teen makeovers and a few secret raids to Deanna's arsenal, this is the first time anyone took the care to show her what was already there, to highlight instead of plaster over.

Sam looks over at her, smiling in the way that presses dimples into her cheeks, and says "Thanks, Dee".

Deanna props her feet on Sam's lap and leans back against the couch, again glued to Twin Peaks. In her periphery she can see Sam worrying at her bottom lip.

No one's opinion should weigh that much, Deanna thinks indistinctly.

"So, pretty sure I'm bi", she says, head-on colliding with Sammy's "Did I ever tell you about Julie?"

 

Deanna is seventeen, scared beyond cogent thought, and alone.

John had been gone for a week. A WEEK, and left Deanna with the Impala ("Yours now", he'd told her when she flashed him her driver's license for the first time, "Not a scratch") and her baby sister in eastern Washington.

Sammy is starving and she can tell. Most days she curls up in the backseat reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld, and doesn't eat from noon til dusk. Deanna hustles in local bars and ignores the way her skin crawls under the scrutiny of too many middle-aged, heavier-than-she-is men. But it's not enough, it's never enough, and her stomach has given up growling at this point.

She makes enough one night to rent Sammy a motel room at the far edge of Harrington, tells her to stay put, and leaves a feeble stack of tens on the counter on her way out the door.

John said Davenport, so Deanna puts the Impala in gear and hits the highway.

When she arrives under the blinking neon of the closest diner, it's 9:32 and black as pitch outside.

She smiles at the waiter scrubbing down tables. She shows him the wallet-sized Polaroid she keeps in her money clip and taps John's face. The waiter blinks, nods, and points her in the direction of a Harvest Moon Motel. He doesn't say anything about the loaded .45 she has tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

He's half-unconscious when she kicks the door down to his motel room, sprawled halfway on the bed and halfway on the floor. It reeks of stale whiskey, bitter sweat, zippo butane. He's holding a bottle of Jack in one fist, but it's dry as desert sand.

He sobs and says, "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Jo."

It's gibberish to her, even through the shock of hearing her father apologize for the first time in what feels like decades.

Deanna takes a deep breath and hauls him up. She grits her teeth as his weight settles fully onto her shoulders, but that's okay; she's been holding him up and taking his weight since she was four years old. He's too far out of it to do much more than flail, but that old hunter instinct tells him to bring the empty bottle swinging toward her. His aim is off, it misses her head, but slams into and shatters against her shoulder blades. She bites her lip and doesn't let go of him, hauls him out to the car. She can feel the warm stickiness of blood tracing the crease of her spine, tiny shards of glass piercing her button-up and tank top and skin. Her fingers curl against the steering wheel, the old, yielding leather, until she can see the peaks of her knuckles threaten to rupture skin.

She doesn't tell Sam. John is already awake and showered and hoarse from yelling by the time they get back, anyway, so it's like nothing has changed. He never brings it up, either, so she tucks it away like it never happened. She's surprised by how easy it is to do that now.

But Sam still sees the tight tendons framing Deanna's wrists. The dissipating fear left over from a thousand worst-case scenarios playing and replaying themselves in her mind. The uncertainty over whether John was being savaged by a wendigo somewhere in backwater Washington or mourning Mary after an in-and-out hunt in the only way he knew how to.

So years later, when Deanna's standing in her living room telling her "Dad went on a hunting trip, hasn't been home in a few days", Sam shuts up and listens.

 

Deanna is twenty-two and can barely keep dinner on the table.

She doesn't dare call Bobby or Pastor Jim to ask for help, because John will never forgive her if she does. Winchesters are made of steel, he rasps at her sometimes before a hunt. Yeah, she never says back, and they shoot to kill.

They've stayed in one spot for too long; the local bars know she's a shark with a pool cue by now and they shy away from her doe-eyes. She can spot a few tracking her with their eyes as she moves around the table, but by now the lust has hardened to anger as they realize they're being scammed.

So she does something she thought she'd never do again, she swore she'd stop doing, and hits the asphalt on her knees for a twenty dollar bill.

At fourteen Deanna learned how to roll a condom onto a stranger's cock with her mouth, and had gotten an extra five dollars for her performance.

It's not like she's selling her soul for every crisp twenty in her back pocket; it's a final resort for when John doesn't come home and Sam hasn't eaten for the past two days. Besides, she likes sex, she's good at it. Freelance, she thinks, isn't that what they call it? She likes the way girls will bite their lower lip when she licks at the right spot, the ways boys will curl their fingers in her hair when she tugs at their fly. She only feels dirty, guilty, when they palm over her payment. When she's reminded that she's not here for their blue eyes or dimples or five o'clock shadow.

She makes one hundred dollars in two days. Her knees ache.

Sam turns eighteen on a steel blue Sunday. Deanna takes her out to breakfast at a Waffle House down the block, laughs when her sister dumps half the maple syrup pitcher onto her stack of pancakes. Growls around a mouthful of bacon when Sam snags a tiny sausage from her plate. When she pays the check, Deanna stares at the twenty in her hand for too long before tucking it in the black bill book.

Sam is effusive and bright and full of smiles as they walk another block toward the heart of Eastport. Deanna points to a sign near the harbor and says, "Heh, Moose Island. Sounds like your kind of place, Sammy", which earns her a bony elbow to the ribs.

Sam drags Deanna into a café and gripes and groans her way through an explanation of what the hell a 'macchiato' is. Deanna orders a black triple-espresso anyway, but Sam catches the tiny flare of teeth when her own ridiculous, frothy, caramel-flavored drink comes out.

They criss-cross through the dog park on the west end. Deanna tries not to bolt for the chain link fences and reminds herself she's doing this for Sammy. Her sister pets every dog within a hundred-foot radius and makes friends with an elderly man and his pug, grinning hard enough to dimple. Deanna tucks her free hand into her cargo jacket and busies herself with her coffee.

Sam leads her by her coat sleeve through the tourist-trap shops of Eastport, babbling about absolutely nothing, staring longingly at boutiques and bookstores over her shoulder. Something hard and tight clenches in the pit of Deanna's stomach, lassoing around her ribcage. Seventy dollars made in back alleys and between sheets burns in her front pocket.

"C'mon." She finally says, just as they reach the piers, and turns back around.

Sammy startles and jogs to catch up. Even though her legs are freakishly long and she lopes like a fucking labrador retriever, Deanna moves like a bullet train, like she has a place to be, ASAP.

Sam bites down hard on her lip when her sister pauses outside the front of Eastport Books Co.

"You're sure?" She asks, shifting from foot to foot. Deanna snorts at her.

"Birthday comes once a year, Sam-I-Am. Now, are you gonna argue or are you gonna get your ass in gear?"

Sam slips by her in a whirlwind of utter glee. The bookstore's small and cramped with its paperback inhabitants, but it smells like wood and ink and leather oil, so maybe it isn't a total bust.

She's never seen her sister like this, attention so fixated on the spines of dusty old volumes, running fingers over covers, tracing embossed fonts, smiling privately to herself as she catches a familiar author or an old favorite. Deanna winces and tries not to think about the three, maybe four books Sam has owned in her lifetime compared to the hundreds she's swallowed whole from libraries all over the country. The reverence, and the apprehension, in her face.

Sam agonizes over Vonnegut and Verne and Bradbury, until she's standing in the middle of the store with "Fahrenheit 451" and "Crome Yellow" in each hand and an impossible choice to make. When Deanna skirts by her, dropping "Get both" into her pained silence, Sam looks up at her with something akin to adoration.

They sit on benches on the piers, watching fishing boats bobble in and out against the waves. As the sky turns gunmetal grey above, Sam says "Thank you" very quietly.

They get back to the motel and everything goes wrong.

"What the fuck do you mean, college?" John is screaming into the silent fallout of a nuclear bomb dropping. Deanna is a live wire of panic and bewilderment. She has no contingency for this. This is bold and new and unexpected and she HATES IT. Hates the confused hurt in her baby sister's voice.

Hates how "I thought you'd be happy for me" cleaves her right in two.

Deanna feels like she's ten years old again, watching her baby sister drive away into pain and misery with her nose against the glass. She glances down at her hands. She can't protect Sam from COLLEGE.

"What," John laughs, breathless, and Deanna feels something ugly and hateful unfurl in her chest, "you think you can just walk out? That's not how hunting works, Sammy, you don't just walk away from it. It's gonna follow you wherever you go."

"Don't call me Sammy."

All the breath is gut punched out of her, John's bottle of whiskey smashing into her back.

"What did you say to me, girl?"

"I said don't call me Sammy."

Deanna blinks. Sam's fists are curled, eyes leaden. The same steel-and-ice expression from when she was a child, a six year old being strung along to her first hunt. And she can't stop it this time, either. She can't. She's the same hollowed out tin soldier she's always been. Daddy's blunt instrument.

Sam slides something out of her jacket pocket. It's crumpled and boxed around the corners, but still relatively smooth. She drops it on the kitchenette countertop between them and steps back. Towards the door.

"I got in. I applied two weeks ago."

Her lungs are tight knots of ice. Deanna stares at the letter, the widening fissure between them, feels her mouth open to words that stick to the lining of her throat. Sam is still staring at their father, tensing as though bracing for another one of John's screaming fits.

Deanna finally gets it. Her gut crystallizes into something black and angry. There's acid in the back of her mouth.

"If you go," John says beside her, whisper-soft, steely and furious, "you don't ever come back."

Sam blanches.

"Wh-"

"You want this?" John slams a palm onto the letter, "Fine. But if you go you never come back."

Sam slamming the door behind her sends her crashing onto the lip of the mattress, breathing hard, fists pressed into the hollows of her eyes. She manages to pull it together long enough to hear John tell her "Go after her, Dee", and her own voice to issue back "Yes sir".

Winchesters are made out of steel, John murmurs to her as she starts for the door. It closes behind her before he can finish.

  
  


Sam gets dropped off in California a week and a half later. She gets out of the car with one box and one duffel's worth of possessions, looks Deanna square in the eyes, then turns her back in favor of the gorgeous SLS campus sprawling out before her.

"Fucking hell," John swears, low in his chest, once Sam has vanished into the mob of undergrads. It's the first thing he's said the whole ride there. Deanna locks her jaw and says nothing; she doesn't trust herself not to scream herself hoarse and run off after her sister. She doesn't cry, either, because that will bring John's wrath down upon her shoulders. He's always favored her obedience over all else.

Instead, John hits the interstate, and Deanna distracts herself for a few miles by researching Aswang lore.

A few hours later, John pulls into a nefarious-looking dive to drink himself into oblivion again. Deanna has one too many cinnamon-flavored whiskeys and goes home with a pretty redhead.

She doesn't understand why she feels like shit the next morning. After all, she wasn't paid this time around.

 

John and Deanna are a fucking force of nature.

They shank five poltergeists over the course of a week, two wendigo the next. Deanna gets a new scar running vertically from hip to thigh, intersecting another older one that wraps around the back of her knee, and John loses a pint of blood stabbing a vampire to death. Deanna watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the motel. John gets blitzed in the bar down the street.

She finally calls Bobby. John throws an empty vase at her, then babbles heartbroken apologies in a voice that cracks.

Deanna fucks three guys in one night, once. She didn't ask for their names, and they never offered. Then she sits in the motel bathroom, listens to John snore, feels the ache in her thighs and between them, relearns how to breathe.

She meets Cassie Robinson and Lisa Braeden and falls in love with them, with the way they look under her, with their voices and whiplash tongues. But when John calls her back she goes. She loves them and leaves them anyway, because John tells her to.

In between her alcohol- and sex-addled reveries she hunts. John sometimes takes the pickup and goes for a few days to run down a skinwalker while she scours the next state over. Other times she leaves John to his bottle of Jack and goes out alone. There's one incident in Oregon with a werewolf that leaves her bleeding out on the forest floor, found by hikers ten hours later with most of her blood pooling around her chest. She calls John from the hospital, but it goes to voicemail. She slips out the emergency exit before the nurses can notice she's gone.

 

It's half-past midnight, three shot glasses and a bottle of Grey Goose are empty, and she hasn't been turned on by any of the skin that's brushed against hers tonight. It's only when she stumbles outside the bar and looks up into the sign down the road proclaiming 'Welcome to Napa Valley!' that she realizes she's in California. She manages to find her way back to the empty motel and promptly pukes up the entire contents of her stomach. The plastic rim of the toilet bowl is cool against her forehead. The tears are hot.

In a moment of weakness she dials Sam's number, then hangs up before the second ring.

Her vision careens into oblivion.

 

Bobby calls her back two months after Sam leaves.

"Your sister's in the newspaper," is all he says. Deanna feels her stomach bottom out.

But it isn't the 'car crash kills four' headline she's expecting; "Stanford Debate Team Wins State" peers up at her instead.

And there's Sammy. Already filled out a bit more in the two months she's been a ghost to Deanna, smiling with her dimples on full-tilt, arm slung over the taller kid holding the trophy. Her eyes aren't the hollowed-out glass they are after a hunt gone south. There's sun in the kiss of tan in her skin, not the milky paleness of too many days spent inside one cheap motel or another.

She calls Bobby back, spits "Fuck you" into the receiver, and hangs up.

 

Deanna is held down on a mattress with arms stronger than hers. The pain overwhelms the pleasure and her orgasm dies in her belly, but his cum is all over her once it's done.

She realizes she doesn't care.

 

Deanna calls John's number eight times, all in one day. They go to voicemail.

She tries Bobby the third day, and doesn't panic.

"You thinkin' he's gone missing?" He asks her.

"I'm hoping he's just passed out in some bar." She replies.

She takes the Impala out again in a lame excuse for an SAR, but this time she's gone for three days without realizing the passage of time.

She calls Pastor Jim on the fifth day.

"He pick up his phone?" He asks her.

"Not yet. Keep an ear out, alright?" She replies.

On the sixth day Deanna dials Sam's number, then flips it closed and stuffs it in her pocket.

She gets in the Impala and drives to California instead.

 

Maybe it's just the unresolved fury in her gut or the sharp-sweet bitterness of sadism that's blossomed in Sam's absence, but Deanna tries her hand at picking the lock instead of knocking, and glides right into the apartment.

She makes noise just to see how far back Sam's fallen into this 'normal life' charade. She picks up and stares down all the framed photographs of Sam and a gorgeous blonde littering the side tables: one of them at the beach, one of them in the library, poking at each other's books. One of them with rainbows painted on their cheeks, Sam's forehead pressed against the blonde's temple, the gentlest smile Deanna's ever seen on her face.

Then she's tackled from behind and thrown to the floor.

"Easy, tiger." Her teeth are fluorescent in the dark, all saccharine raptor grin.

Sam's expression crumples. Deanna's teeth click together.

Four years, and not even a hello.

 

Sam is still the whiny little bitch Deanna used to noogie when they were kids. She doesn't know if that makes the distance between them better or worse.

She knocks Deanna's cassette tapes right out of the gate, even though half of them were gifts from her anyway. Fourteen year old Sammy's handwriting scrawls 'Greatest Hits of Metallica' on the side of Deanna's favorite.

She's tried so hard to distance herself from Sam's inextricable presence, but here she is, completely Deanna-free and normal in the shotgun seat. It isn't fair, that she's the one left with shrapnel.

But something within her breaks anyway when her sister says "It's Sam, okay?" over the klaxon of guitar riffs.

Because Sam will never not be able to hurt her.

 

They rent a motel room in Idaho two weeks later.

Sam is still pale and shaken by nightmares of fire and scorched flesh and boiling blood. There's nothing Deanna can do to help her, which is almost as infuriating as their tense silences.

Deanna picks up a few more jugs of gasoline for the road at a Speedway, and is putting them away at the foot of her bed to load into the trunk later when a familiar theme starts to play.

She doesn't really think about it, but when she cracks open the fridge for a beer, her "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, it's continuing mission…" duets Sam's with perfect synchronicity.

Sam stares at her from over the top of the couch, just her eyes and forehead. Deanna stares back.

She hasn't laughed this hard in weeks, no, in months. Two and a half months, exactly. Her voice trips and cracks over the foreign sound. But Sam is laughing too, shallow and nervous but honest-to-God genuine all the same. Laughing and smiling in a way that doesn't dimple, doesn't reach her eyes. Deanna takes it anyway, and grabs both of them a summer ale.

They talk in Spartan, sparse phrases that don't really mean anything. Conversation between them has been distended and awkward for a while now, and that's something that doesn't change over a friendly beer and an episode of TNG. They can at least look each other in the eyes, bicker and squabble over Deanna's mullet rock, take turns pounding each other into the ground in marathon games of I Spy and Slug Bug. At least they have that.

Sam gets up midway through an episode to grab an orange from the mini fridge. When she peels it in quick, efficient strips and offers Deanna a third on instinct, they stare at each other. The sharp smell of citrus is thick and astringent; it smells like days spent in the sun in Bobby's lot, hard days of rain and John's screaming tirades safe under pillow forts they built together, cold days of hunting and tracking and killing in backwater forests.

This was Sam offering the smallest olive branch she had, completely on accident, on a habit she'd learned and relearned through a childhood of this smallest gesture of 'I love you'. When Deanna didn't eat for days but would pass it off as nothing. When Sam could feel the dagger claws of rage embed in her after an argument with John and all she wanted to do was curl up with a book and smell the cool tang of citrus.

Deanna closed her fingers around the offered wedge, keeping her expression carefully neutral, and turned back to the television.

For the first time in days, Deanna can see the tension slough off of her sister's shoulders.

 

Sam and Deanna are more than a force of nature; they're moiety halves, a locus of unholy wrath and merciless power, the story monsters tell their children to make them fear the dark and toe the line. Be careful, or the Winchesters will get you.

They're metal in the forge: falling apart and then binding back together even stronger than before, but each time it gets harder, each time they're left more broken than put together. Twisted over and over again, but never truly taken apart the way they need to be, never fully fixed. Just endless welding over seams that don't fit together. Endless patchwork of a machine that's slowly falling apart.

 

In hell, Deanna is undone completely.

 

Alistair is every childhood nightmare, every hunt gone sour. The darkness in her periphery and the monster in the midnight shadows. The glass shattering against her back. Her sister screaming in the dark.

He pulls her apart slowly, with the dull edge of a knife and the clinical sharpness of a razor. He traces the contours of her body in ruthless iron and steel. Runs butane-slick fingers over her lips and arms, then kisses them with a lit match. He breaks three of her ribs so that they rest heavy against her lungs, until all she can do is gasp feebly. Wrenches her open with pliers.

She realizes vaguely that Dante was wrong. Hell is cold.

Alistair whispers little treasons about John in the spaces between breaths. His words take on an agony of their own. He tells her she's not strong enough. She spits blood at him.

Winchesters are made of steel, she reminds herself as the blade descends again. It becomes a hollow litany, an unfulfilled entreaty. A prayer.

There is no night in Hell, just the long eternity of darkness. When she feels herself slipping into that black Alistair wrenches her back. She begins to hallucinate from sleep-deprivation, and he watches her as she struggles and sobs in her waking nightmares.

"Your Daddy was stronger than this." Alistair hisses into her hair, pulling out her teeth.

Deanna understands too late that she is not made of steel. That she is broken and weak in the circles of Hell, collapsed under rage and brimstone, unraveled by pain. That she could protect herself no more than she was able to protect Sam.

Her fingers wrap around Alistair's knife when he offers it, and it feels like an initiation.

 

Her first is a young woman in her early thirties, still wild-eyed and in a flush of panic. But Deanna can see her soul, and it weeps like an open wound, raw and black and wrong. She wonders if that's what her soul looks like now, and as she begins to carve into that twisted black thing, she imagines that it's her own.

Alistair coaxes her through the motions, guiding her knife to kiss sinew and marrow, slide across arteries and veins and wrest through tendons. Teaches her how to pull the damned from oblivion and back onto the tip of her blade. Teaches her how to make it last.

Deanna understands pain, in an elemental, pure way. But this is agony, this is torture, and it's messy and knotted and convoluted. But it is still pain.

She makes them feel it their fists and in the walls of their eyelids, scorching down their spine and in the curve of their skull and the swell of their jugular.

And when she can't take the endless screaming anymore, because this is starting to feel RIGHT, to feel GOOD, the blinding wall of white reaches out for her.

It twists and writhes, shrieking in vengeful ultraviolet, righteous and infinite and terrifying, scalding and burning in the way of supernovae.

It reaches out for her, for the tiny hands of a girl who couldn't protect her sister, whose soul is as black as any demon from the blood she's drenched it in, and she reaches back.

 

Castiel looks nothing like the tiny porcelain angel Mary Winchester had picked to stand guard over her daughters' nursery. He moves like the long arms of a hurricane; the barn doors crash open and Deanna takes a step back, two, reaches for Ruby's knife as she and Bobby open fire in sync. There's a flicker of hesitation in the way her fingers grasp the hilt, all too similar to the way she'd clung to Alistair's knife. The light strips above spit little fireflies down toward where they stand. 

"Who are you?"

Castiel tips his head at her, the motion smooth and falcon-like.

"I am the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition."

Deanna feels her stomach bottom out.

"Yeah. Thanks for that."

Deanna lunges, rattlesnake-quick, the knife a gleaming arc of silver in her palm before it thuds deep into Castiel's chest. It hits the line of his breastbone and stops. She lets out the shuddering breath she didn't know she'd been holding in. Castiel grips the knife hilt in one hand and yanks, vicious and implacable, and the blade slides out untarnished. He stares down at it for a moment in something like consideration. Deanna's paradigm is pitching and bucking violently.

He twists Bobby around from where he'd been stealthily approaching him, pressing two fingers to his forehead and watching him crumple to the spray-paint splattered hardwood with that same appraising head tilt. He arrests her with eyes the same luminous blue as the sky over Lawrence, Kansas on January 24, 1979.

"We need to talk, Deanna. Alone."

 

It dissolves into flashes after that. Images, impressions, of Deanna's life. Rapidfire, the barrage of bullets in a melee. Never enough to construct a full picture, but they tessellate into something larger, something shadowed with 40 years of hell and 30 years of Earth, of seven hundred endless deaths put on loop, of Sammy's brilliant hazel eyes and Castiel's smoky blue ones, the smell of navel oranges and Bobby's detergent and John's gun-cleaning oil. Of wide black wings, always in her periphery.

Deanna is not made of steel. She is made out of moments, threaded together with her own tenacity. She is made out of the hope and loyalty and love of the family she has built come hell or high water, out of the ashes of the motherfucking Apocalypse.

 

Sam's lips, leaking demon blood in long red gouges that frame her mouth, eyes overly bright but hollow to their very core.

The way she screamed and sobbed and begged from behind the metal walls of the panic room.

 

The feeling of Ruby's body going stiff in shock as the blade in Deanna's fist finds its home.

 

The blinding white beacon rising up from the blood beneath it as Lucifer is freed.

 

The relentless molten red pain as Castiel's fist connects with her jaw, her own wrecked voice spitting out "I need you" in the basal way in which all truth is spoken.

 

The echo of the Colt firing.

 

The small smile Sam gave Deanna before being buffeted back into the gaping maw of Lucifer's Cage.

 

And over it all, like the thin layer of silver over a daguerreotype, is Castiel's voice, asking her endlessly,

"You don't think you deserve to be saved?"

 

* * *

  
  


Deanna wrenches away, her body moving on animal instinct. She wants to run and scream and rage and vomit, but she doesn't trust herself to do any of it- she just feels the heat of fresh tears retrace their route down her cheeks, clinging to her chin. The skeletal fingers of her ribcage are wrapped tight around her lungs and she CAN'T BREATHE. A pain like Alistair's knife guts her, stabbing into her abdomen and twisting. The rest of her is numb.

Castiel hovers at her side, the two fingers he had held to her forehead lowering, radiating concern that creases his eyebrows and drags the corners of his mouth down into a frown. The sun is bitter bright behind him, settling into the cradle of the horizon.

"I've upset you." He murmurs. After so long of being trapped with the voices of her past, his words sound brittle and alien. Everything is too lucid, has too much clarity laced into it.

Deanna chokes on a ragged gasp and reminds herself that this is now.

Sammy in that bleak black hell, trapped, like Deanna had been for forty goddamn years. Castiel with her more than not, filling a very different space in her that smells of citrus and glimmers like hot summer days in Sioux Falls. Her baby roaring and purring in turns under her.

This is her now, she thinks. And then the ache sets in.

"That long?" She manages, after bruising away the tear tracks on her face with the heels of her palms.

Castiel purses his lips, one of the human gestures that never looks quite natural on him. As though he's still clinging desperately to his Grace even as his own body betrays him.

"Since the beginning," He agrees, "I have always heard your mother's prayers. They were beautiful. I apologize, emotional transference is an expected side effect."

Deanna shakes her head, fingers wrapping bleach-white around the neck of the beer next to her.

"We don't experience time in the same way humans do," Castiel continues, quieter now, with a pang of some unfathomable grief that hits Deanna like a bullet.

"It is nothing so linear as the way you have lived out your life. As soon as I found you in the third circle, I could see everything I have shown you, all at once. That is how I knew you were truly Righteous."

Funny, what can pass as the tipping point for her these days.

She pushes herself off the hood of the Impala with her beer in a death grip at her side, stalking away from words she didn't think she could bear and refreshed memories she knew she couldn't stomach. The door of their motel room slams shut in her wake.

She drowns herself in the alcohol crammed into the mini fridge and pretends this isn't the road John Winchester once hurtled down, hurt beyond all imagining and alone in every way that matters, the only consolation to be found at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey.

 

She'd known it from the first, sitting in the driver's seat of the Impala watching her sister pick through her cassette collection.

Sam would never not be able to hurt her.

 

Castiel pads into the motel room long after the sun has dipped below the horizon. In the backlight of the television, Deanna thinks she sees his wings paint the wall behind him, but the impression of their massive shadow is gone as soon as it comes, smoke sliding between her fingers.

"You taking off?" She asks over the rim of her shot glass. He eyes it with distaste.

"Yes."

She nods, tracing the outline of that ridiculous trench coat in the half-light thrown by the television. She realizes how worn he looks. One rebellious angel against one thousand without guidance from the God he'd been promised.

One scared little kid trying so desperately to take care of her sister without so much as a glance from Daddy Dearest.

"Cas," She calls, staring straight into the empty bottle of Jack on her lap. Huh. So the answers weren't there, after all.

Maybe it's time she tried looking for them somewhere else.

"When you're done herding the unruly masses or whatever," She tells him, earnest in a way she can't remember being since the Cage, "get your feathery ass back down here. We'll go for pancakes or something."

She can imagine the slight furrow in his brow even as the corners of his mouth dimple in something akin to amusement.

"You cannot buy my companionship with breakfast foods, Deanna."

"I can try." She shoots back, defiant to the last.

The air sighs around him as his wings arch back, preparing for the jolt that will send him back

into the heavenly fray.

"You don't need to." He murmurs, and is gone.

 

Sam isn't here, but Cas is, and that isn't FAIR.

But when has it ever been about what's fair? Almost-ageddon wasn't fair. Deanna's so-called "destiny" wasn't fair. Every innocent life wasted in the name of fucking collateral damage wasn't fair. Deanna had learned to roll with those punches anyway; or, at least, to absorb the blows when they landed.

She can't go back to Lisa, not with the giant rift in her widening by the day. Not when she can barely force herself upright in the morning. Not when all she wants to do is sleep and not dream. That has nothing to do with fairness; Deanna just doesn't believe in pointless cruelty for either of them. And especially not for Ben.

Castiel bamfs back into her life when he can, each time a little more ragged around the edges. Playing sheriff is putting dents in him, she can see it. Still, she tries to keep the shadows out of his expression with cheap food and old movies. She takes him to Eegee's when they pass through Arizona, and even ignores the confused little noises he makes when she tries explaining to him that dipping them in ranch dressing is a socially acceptable way to eat his french fries. He just levels her with an I Don't Understand You Humans, I'm Just a Humble Angel of the Lord look, which has her laughing around the straw of her slushie. She can't remember the last time she laughed, not out of spite or bitter fury. But then she remembers the Cage, and she knows with perfect clarity when the last time she laughed was.

They don't stick around long after that.

 

Castiel comes back from his perpetual heavenly riot one night with blood leeching out of a gash in his cheek, shoulder twisted into an unnatural angle. He turns pitiful eyes on Deanna as she hefts open the first aid kit.

"Holy bar brawl?" She guesses. He frowns at her.

"Iophiel was not pleased by the recent… changes made to the heavenly order. Barachiel was the first to resort to violence, however."

Deanna grimaces, dabbing at the cut with a damp cotton pad. Castiel doesn't so much as wince.

She suddenly goes very, very still.

"Deanna?" Castiel tries, finding the distant hollowness that permeates her every expression and watching it carefully. She blinks.

"I'm fine. I just…" She exhales noisily, "Nothing."

She braces her hands against his dislocated shoulder, fixed for a moment on how small her hands look pressed against his jacket, and gives a single sharp yank.

Castiel shudders as his vessel resettles, a tremor Deanna has come to identify with him dismissing the lurid pain like an error message.

"If you're ever in trouble like that again," Deanna blurts, "and you need me, just

call me. 'Funky town' is the codeword for trouble, okay?"

Castiel frowns, eyebrows coming down low. Deanna packs up the kit in quick, efficient swipes.

"I do not understand that reference."

Deanna smiles at him, an unconscious curl of her lips, settling back on the couch with him.

"You have time for a Buffy marathon?"

"I don't understand your affinity for this show, either."

"Angels. You just don't get quality television."

Halfway through the third episode Deanna is sprawled out across two cushions, head pillowed on Cas's lap, hair a brilliant blonde flame spilled across his legs. Her hand curls near her breastbone, an unchecked habit to hold something that used to be there.

When Castiel departs, he makes sure a blanket covers her shoulders and a pillow is settled under her head, the television tinny static in the background.

He thinks she looks peaceful this way.

Deanna wakes up the next morning relaxed, warm despite the Colorado draft, the vague scent of sunlight wreathed around her.

 

A week later finds both of them standing on the porch of Bobby's farmhouse, Deanna in a wildcat rage and Castiel in an icy cold divine fury.

Thunderclouds have congregated overhead, forked lightning striking out from among the ominous overcast, but it hasn't rained yet. The smell of ozone is thick in the air. Deanna knows the all-out putsch Upstairs probably isn't helping the suddenly crap weather.

Castiel appeared against the door frame as soon as Deanna stepped through the front door. The angle of his cheek bones was sharper than she remembered, as was the cut of his shoulders below the slouchy trench coat.

"What are you doing here?" He asked, sharp in a way that surprised Deanna. She shrugged him off, making a beeline for the library.

"Came to dig up some books, see if I can't get anything useful from Bobby's dust-magnets."

Castiel never learned to hone his blunt straightforwardness into something a shade more subtle. His jaw clicks as he says, "You're here to find how to reopen Lucifer's Cage."

Deanna stops in the middle of the swirling dust motes and towering shelves. For a second she closes her eyes, remembers the shuffle and crackle of old pages being turned, Bobby's low voice mingling with John's as they poured over these ancient tomes.

"Aren't you supposed to be talking the garrison down from the heavenly ledge?"

"Do not try to evade me." Castiel fills the doorway.

"I'm not fucking leaving her in there!" Deanna hissed, turning on him, stalking up to him until she leers into his personal space. His expression is as stormy as the weather outside. She shoves by him.

He follows her with eerily quiet footsteps, dodging the slamming screen door with an angel's easy grace.

"The Cage is not easily manipulated. You know this. Your sister chose an honorable death."

"But it's not death, is it?" Deanna's anger is a bile in her throat, magma in the mouth of a volcano, volatile and lethal, "She's still down there, with both of those fucking bastards, in some hellacious pit. That place is torture personified, Cas, I can't leave her there. I-"

Deanna swallows hard on all the words that won't come, half-formed and inelegant. Words that are more helpless guilt and grief and fear than cogent thought.

"I can't let her go through what happened to me."

"This is not the way to solve this." Castiel chides her.

"Neither is sitting around with my thumbs up my ass! Why can't you understand this?"

"I do," Castiel says, in a voice that scrapes through his chest and tangles in his throat.

"I assure you, I do. This was Michael's struggle for millennia, after Lucifer fell. We all mourned him, Michael more keenly than any of us. But to open the Cage is to let everything within it out, and that includes Lucifer himself."

Deanna presses her fists to her eyes, feeling the muscle in her jaw work.

"So help me."

"This is of a higher echelon than me, Deanna."

Deanna glares at him, hard.

"That's not good enough."

Castiel gestures broadly, another human tic his vessel had integrated without his consent.

"It is all I have."

Deanna takes in a ragged breath and leans against the rough woodwork of the porch railings. The paint is flaking in some places, slightly damp under the humidity. The thunderheads swirl in slow, winding patterns above.

"Okay. Okay. If you help me figure out a way, I promise I won't just open it up. We can start here. Bobby's gotta have something."

Castiel nods, watching the strong line of her spine tense into the familiar ferocity with which she has always carried herself. Her shoulders canted back, determined in the way a soldier marches to war.

"You are not like Michael." He finds himself saying.

"When Lucifer fell, Michael grieved, but in time accepted his descent as God's will. You are not so obedient."

Deanna doesn't look at him, facing away, but for a moment Castiel can see the strong angles of her body, the ones she has always let him depend on as his touchstone,

as they soften. And then the screen door swings shut and she disappears into the kitchen for coffee.

Castiel watches the storm clouds, frowning.

 

Cas isn't always around to fend off the nightmares, but when she prays to him after they finish ravaging her subconscious, she can sometimes find him sitting on the couch.

They've set up temporary shop at the farmhouse, or at least until one of them can find a good enough lead to hit the road again. Deanna's missed the farmhouse, but it feels shallow and empty without Bobby to fill it.

She can still hear the crack of his neck snapping when she falls asleep

Castiel meets her on the couch, looking worse for wear as he typically is. Deanna slinks onto the cushions and curls up beside him, snagging the remote from between them.

He's still here, she reminds herself. Cas is still here.

His fingers flutter across her hair.

"Nightmares fucking suck." She mutters into the arm of his jacket.

She settles on a rerun of The Lone Ranger (the old one, not the new Disney trash), and Castiel sits patiently and watches it even though he doesn't get the appeal of it at all.

She curls an arm under her and rests her head in Cas's lap, blinking away visions of blood and agony and fire that are burned into the backs of her eyelids.

"Deanna?"

"Hn?"

"I believe you would make an admirable John Reid."

Deanna laughs, twisting to peer up at him.

"Yeah? You'd make a good Tonto," She smiles, a flash of white, "or you could be the horse."

Cas makes a face like the idea offends him on some deep existential level. His fingers brush across the ridge of her hairline where it meets her ear. Her grin is pure in the half light, crinkling the corners of her eyes. He's warmer by degrees than she is, a side effect of compacting so much divine energy into a static form. The heat soughs into her skin and untangles the knots her muscles have kinked themselves into. Castiel watches her fall back asleep while The Lone Ranger winds down.

He remembers the story of Eden well; Raziel and Iophiel would take turns retelling the creation of the Earth and the Seven Days to the younger echelon in the garrison, the soldiers without command. Their Father had filled Eden with warmth and light and color, piecing together a beautiful tapestry of life from base atoms and ether. Gentle breezes rolling across smooth valleys, roses and poppies and tiger lillies that filled the air with a honeyed perfume. Castiel had never created before. As a soldier, his commands from on high dictated his motions on a battlefield, to meet the enemy and slay them.

As he pulled Deanna from the third circle, wrapped in the holy light of his wings, erasing the char of sin from her bones and the thrumming pulsepoint of her soul, he imagined this was how creating Eden had felt. Making something beautiful from nothing.

 

Deanna wakes up to cold sweat and hot tears, gasping for a breath that won't stick like ash to the roof of her mouth. The blankets are rucked up and sprawled across her thighs. The sliver of moon rising in the sky can only lend shadows to her old room in the farmhouse. Deanna folds in on herself like an origami bird, knees and elbows collapsing together. Her hands cling to the space where the pendant used to hang, in the hollow of her collarbone, fingers meshing together in a prison of flesh and bone around nothing.

Her lips move in silent prayer.

His name is perfect and whole in the back of her mind. It lies untouched there, becoming a litany, an entreaty, in repetition. The rest of her suppresses shivers in a sudden chill that has nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

Her sister screams in the perfect clarity of memory. Endless, throat-shredding screams. The fire and brimstone and jacinth around her become smoke under the pressure of a rage older than time.

Castiel's wings beat once when he arrives, their sound a pocket of white noise. The air pressure in the room takes a nosedive. She hates the dip to his shoulders and the bruises under his eyes.

He stands by the foot of her bed for a heartbeat, utterly still, and then sits down next to her on the wadded up blanket between them. He looks so unfathomably tired. Exhausted in a way an angel should never be. Just like she is.

"Come here," she says, mouth miles ahead of her thoughts. She realizes what she had said too late. She cringes from it anyway.

His eyes crinkle as his head tips gently to one side. There's confusion touching the corners of his mouth, but softness in the line of his spine. Trust.

She wonders when she learned to read him so well.

Castiel reaches out and touches her arm, a cursory motion, and then drops like a stone onto the pillow beside her. His eyes follow her as she straightens out the blanket and tucks herself into the hollow he makes for her in the curve of his abdomen. She doesn't flinch when his fingers curl in her hair- not to hold her still, just experimental, curious, reverent.

She sleeps in dreamless oblivion curled up against him: two open parentheses, back to back.

 

In the morning Castiel is gone. Deanna slips out of bed and drapes a thick throw blanket over her shoulders.

He's leaning against the windowsill in the kitchen, watching a flock of birds twist, ribbon like, in the air far away from the lot. His hair and coat are both rumpled from keeping still beside her all night, but the curve of his back is stronger, and the proud angle to his chin is back.

Then Deanna notices the open jug of Folgers sitting in a ring of powdered black dust on the countertop.

"Did you try to make coffee?"

Castiel doesn't startle, glancing her way before straightening up and turning around. He frowns at the plastic Folgers container as though it had harmed him in some grievous way.

"The directions were misleading."

Deanna smiles and grabs the roll of paper towels Bobby always kept underneath the sink. She hands them to him, and pads over to the coffee pot to see what the extent of the damage was.

Something sludgy and an unappealing brown in the bottom of the pot greets her. She throws it in the sink, wrinkling her nose, and firehoses the shit out of it. Castiel still looks vaguely hurt and frustrated.

"You don't even like coffee." She reminds him, dumping out the now-soupy brown whatever-the-hell-that-is.

"You do."

She stops, staring hard at the coffee pot.

"You tried making coffee for me?"

"You are irritable without caffeine."

Her fingers curl around the lip of the sink, arms bracing herself over the gurgling drain. She forces air in and out of her lungs, but the feeling of not being able to breathe doesn't go away.

In her mind's eye, a little girl with bright hazel eyes and tangled brown hair offers her a mug of lukewarm brown sludge, the sweetest smile sloping across her lips.

"Thanks, Cas. But I think the gas station down the block would have done fine." She says, keeping her voice light, prying her fingers free from their death grip. She smiles at him over her shoulder, but he's always been able to see right through her, so easily. She hates it.

She sets the pot back in its cradle and plugs it back in, filling the cache without thinking about it. She realizes belatedly that she'd spooned out enough instant coffee mix for three. Her teeth grit and she keeps moving without thinking about it.

"You want eggs?" She asks. Her voice is going to crack soon if she keeps beating it into cheerful plasticity.

"Deanna."

She reaches up for the smaller skillet hanging from its s-hook over the steam hood, but her fingers slip and the pan clatters to the ground.

Castiel is staring at her. She can feel it. She's stopped breathing.

"Deanna." He says again, without the worried edge in it this time, cracking the silence open.

"I miss them so much."

Her mouth moves, and she can feel the vibration of the words in her throat, but can't hear them. They taste dry as ash.

Castiel slips his fingers around her wrists. She wants to pull away from him, and the phantom pain of bruises that had healed a long time ago encircling the same wrists. But he's not holding her down, his grip not possessive or claiming. He's holding her in. Anchoring her to herself.

Just like he did in hell, piecing her back together, restitching her seams and threading closed her gaping wounds.

He doesn't say anything when she lets her head fall against his shoulder, pillowing her forehead in the familiar firewood-and-winter smell of his trench coat.

She doesn't say anything when his fingers slip from her wrists to her hands, and stay there, entangled.

They're both silent when, after minutes or maybe hours, her nose ghosts against his jaw and he turns toward the warmth in her skin.

It's not a kiss so much as it is gravity having its way.

She recognizes instantly that this isn't cheap sex in a back alley in a town that will be in her rearview inside of a week, and a knot of cold fear knits itself against her ribs, sparkling like chips of ice. But Castiel is pure heat and the stillness of an angel who doesn't need to breathe, the same curious-slash-earnest mixture in the way his lips slot with hers as in everything else he does.

Deanna pulls away when the coffee pot hisses to get her attention. She pours herself a cup with a strange tension that has nothing to do with the molten warmth seeping down from her mouth into the core of her. Castiel watches her silently, fingers slowly uncurling from where they used to be twined with hers. She takes her mug back upstairs, hunched over it in a sports bra and pajama bottoms.

Castiel watches the birds circle in lazy circuits against the blue-grey tarp of the sky, pockets of shimmering heatwave mirages cropping up between stacks of cars. He picks at the thought of cloaking Deanna in his wings and engraining her marrow with tendrils of his Grace, the hot coal of dual want and fear that settled into the cradle of his ribs when her lips found his.

When Deanna comes back downstairs her bag is in one fist, empty mug in the other. Castiel is frowning at the cloudless morning.

"Come on, Tonto," Deanna calls over her shoulder as she makes her way to the porch, slinging her duffel over a shoulder and holding the screen door open. She's smirking, a tiny touch of happiness in the bow of her lips.

Castiel tilts his head at her, feeling the slow sureness of fondness curl one side of his mouth, still honeyed and dewy from her lips. Her shoulder brushes his as she passes him for the driver's-side door.

"Let's hit the road."

 

* * *

 

"Feeling more human and hooked on her flesh I

Lay my heart down with the rest at her feet

Fresh from the fields, all fetor and fertile

It's bloody and raw, but I swear it is sweet"

-Hozier

  
  



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